Practicing on a (newly acquired rental) violin in my room as the sun gets close to setting:
Shot with a D200, Zeiss 50/1.4
Violin
other
Change? Here!
WE CAN CHANGE!
*ka-clink*……*ka-clink*..*ka-clink*
*whirrrrrrrrrrrr*
*ssshhhhHHHHHhhhckk* ( <– the sound of a vacuuming/sealing machine)
…
Ta-daaah!
We can change.
(we’ll bottle it too, if you want; just bring $3 for the deposit, glassware ain’t cheap)
I'm at work and Spain has this–
–and I’m paid hourly.
Spain’s got this.
I mean it, and I’m done writing now.
New-old paintbrush/emergency-battle-mace
Graduation gift-money + selling math textbooks –> new old-camera owner and thank-you notes aplenty, and sad feelings of having betrayed my old standby math book.
I’ll miss you, oh antiquated 3rd edition Taylor and Mann calculus text.
Six important things she does:
1. accept 35mm film
2. aperture priority mode
3. meter light
4. time things (12 seconds, namely)
5. battle-mace duty in case somebody thinks they’d like have her, or other things
6. exposure lock
Six important things she doesn’t do:
1. shutter speed priority mode
2. automatic mode
3. auto focus
4. kill batteries (battery life measured in years of use…let’s see a dSLR do that)
5. exposure bracketing
6. tempt me to ruin moments by snapping off eighteen frames when one is perfect.
“Bess,” maybe?
(shot with my digital camera. odd)
Wow, today
Ok…I’ve resisted a long time. I have not wanted to be one of those harking naffs who writes a really boring several paragraphs every day about every day. Well here are lots of paragraphs about today, because today was nuts.
1. World Cup:
-Tim Howard, you are incredible. Past making boss saves, the one corner at the end, when the other keep jumped up to punch it and his HAND was just barely higher than your HEAD. That is awesome. To the rest of the boys in red, white and blue: you rock. Way to represent your country to the world, what an incredible run. I can’t say it any better than a radio announcer did: “there is nothing left. Those boys left everything they had on the field.”
2. My little sister:
She’s in Texas right now for the annual National Jumprope Tournament, she spent all of yesterday puking her guts out and her 4 person team took first place in their age bracket today. Like…what? How does that work? How is that humanly possible? She will be on ESPN competing against all other 4 person teams for the Grand Champion title.
Dear Beth: go hit your routine tomorrow like you never have before. Go hit it in the teeth with a big chair so hard, swing for the fences and show’em what you’ve got.
(no photo can capture the awesomeness here, so no photo here shall be)
3. Ham Radio:
After one evening (6+ hours) and one morning (2+ hours) of intense strong-coffee-aided studying of radio, I passed the FCC General Class Amateur Radio exam (lots of capital letters there). Jason and my pops did the same. We can now use all VHF/UHF bands and almost (there are, like, two tiny restrictions) all HF bands. “HF” means wavelengths from 10 to 160 meters. That’s some long waves. With a bit of practice, that means free (well…after buying a radio. Ouch.) and cooler-than-skype worldwide communication with friends and family.
It’s also a good excuse to, someday when I have the pickup I’ll go offroad-camping-exploring in, have a wicked awesome radio on the dash and a nice big antenna swaying from the back bumper.
4. “You can put that on the label, baby.”
(see the post above this one)
What a day.
Edit:
…and I just now (10:30pm) discovered a better way to slice cheese. No joke.
By twos
Two things I hate:
1. Hurtful words; straight up my friend, I hate these.
2. “What could’ve been;” the quotation marks are important here…I have never seen good of any form come from “what could’ve been,” and I know a lot of bad of all sorts that’s come from it.
Two pieces of wisdom from a dayhike to Camp Muir:
1. Put on sunblock the second time. Always; period.
2. As calories begin to seem positively delicious entirely because they simply are calories, so does any/all food begin to seem positively delicious. Finishing a long hike at 5:00pm = hello you beautiful lukewarm Burger King Sausage Biscuit that I left on the dashboard 11 hours prior. Mmmmmm.
Two aspirations:
1. Have a porch and make real nice wooden chairs for it.
2. Tend a small garden, and keep a planter box (for the aforenoted porch) of flowers; I think they’d be Carnations.
Two excerpts–
–from All the Pretty Horses, written by Cormac McCarthy
——–
Rawlins mounted up. You ready? he said.
I been ready.
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once a jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and the thousand worlds for the choosing.
——–
That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
——
The final final paper!
While this short scribbling is the type of thing generally reserved for twitter or facebook, they say your most important audience is yourself, and in this case the most important audience dearly feels this short scribbling is more significant than facebook world and/or twitter world are good for.
Without more ado:
When I click the button in the other open browser tab, I will have submitted the last homework (ironically an essay on education) of my undergrad career; my last lecture is today from 1:00 to 3:20.
*click*
*silence*
Wow.
Edit:
Class got out at slightly after 2:00. College is an interesting thing; I finished it this afternoon.
Front porch coffee–
(I love sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, thinking hard or lightly wondering, sometimes not thinking at all, or joking and talking with a friend.
The porch has got to be the best place to watch and hear and smell the season: breezy summer afternoons (fragrant lilacs and freshly cut grass), fiery autumn sunsets (last-chance backyard BBQing and simply crisp air), et cetera.
Stairs, curbs, or benches are all reasonable porch-substitutes; however the porch can’t ever be truly beat, especially if it’s old and weathered.
A good cup of coffee is often just right, too.)
–It’s a good name.
Advent
Advent
Two thousand years go by while while on the Cross
Our Lord is suffering still–there is no end
Of pain: the spear pierces, nails rend–
And we below with Mary weep our loss.
The chilling edge of night crawls round the earth;
At every second of the centuries,
The dark comes somewhere down, with dreadful ease
Slaying the sun, denying light’s rebirth.
But if the agony and death go on,
Our Lady’s tears, Our Lord’s most mortal cry,
So, too, the timeless lovely birth again–
And the forsaken tomb. Today: the dawn
That never ended and can never die
In breaking glory ushers in the slain.
Sheldon Vanauken
Need to cut a hole through a bridge for maintenance?
Binford, you’ve been one-upped.
This is a hydraulically powered chainsaw designed for cutting concrete.
That’s all.
Bye
:’-(
Bye Grandma.
When she was a grad student, she broke her leg skiing down the Ave (in the U-district, Seattle) on two boards in a snow storm.
Continue Reading
Stochastic process
(from a week ago)
Ya know those clouds of mosquito-like (are they actually mosquitoes? I’m not sure–they look it, but I’ve never been bitten by one of them) bugs that slowly migrate around on cool spring and summer evenings?
A moment ago I was just nearly hit–or rather engulfed–by one, and promptly began to wonder. What a crazy and unpredictable thing that cloud is. It’s nuts. Then I thought about planet earth; wow.
It’s mind-blowing. You and I are tiny parts of an infinitely more crazy/beautiful/unpredictable process than those bug clouds. You and I can laugh, cry, learn, love, hurt, heal, and be.
I’m not sure what to think about this. All I think at the moment is that it’s great. It is truly great.
Lights
Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
-Coldplay